With the version 4.4 comes a full rewrite of the Overlay engine.
This engine takes cares of drawing anything that is not part of the render engine output and that is visible in the viewport.
This rewrite was focused on removing technical dept and pave the way for future performance improvements. However, there can be some small functional changes.
This thread is to discuss possible side effects of the changes and report small regressions. Bigger regressions should be reported through the bug tracker.
How to test Overlay Next
Overlay Next is default starting November 22nd 2024. Download the latest daily build for testing.
The legacy Overlay engine can still be toggled through the experimental options for checking regression but will soon be removed. Edit: Now removed (December 3rd)
Disabling legacy option requires a Blender restart. Otherwise, trying to select or use the auto depth feature to navigate might result in a crash.
Known changes
Object centers are now always rendered in front of edit overlays.
The Xray display behavior now fade in-front overlays correctly.
Some overlays that were missing anti-aliasing and UI scaling support now do.
Disclaimer
We’re mostly aiming at feature parity with the legacy Overlay. Please do not use this thread for feature requests. Thank you!
There’s a issue with bones appearing either jagged/obscured (or not at all) in shaded and render view.
(In 4.2, there are no problems.)
Nvidia 3060 ti, studio drivers 552.22
ETA: This was tested with blender-4.4.0-alpha+main.0df7cf4be85d-windows that I downloaded about 18 hours ago, so will download the new build and retest if needed.
Disabling smooth wires overlay seems to hide wireframe in XRay mode. I don’t use AA or AA lines in my viewport, too smooth for my eyes, I prefer contrasty lines due to my eyesight.
Before: Selecting empty space worked as deselect all.
Now: Selecting empty space does nothing.
It this a bug or expected (but unwanted) behavior?
PS. Definitely a bug. After a few minutes it all of a sudden started working, but with bugs (selecting same empty patch of space would result in selecting everything or deselecting everything). After closing and opening Blender again it started working as expected, but after yet another Blender restart all of the bugs came back.
XRay alpha is broken
Previously, in 4.3 and earlier, you could have XRay alpha set to 1.0, so that you could have XRay selection enabled but don’t have the ugly transparent drawing of the whole scene.
This especially applies to Object Mode, where XRay is useless because it doesn’t affect selection in any way. In other words, when you have XRay enabled so you can do essential modeling task (being able to select occluded geometry) you can no longer stay in this mode because whole scene being transparent completely destroys its readability.
Currently in 4.4, XRay alpha at 1.0 straight up disables XRay:
4.3 - XRay Alpha at 1.0 (everything opaque but wireframe/facedots drawn as transparent):
It is no longer possible to use XRay without compromising display quality of the whole scene. Since in Blender, XRay is directly tied to how mesh selection works, in 4.4, it is no longer possible to model in Blender without compromising display quality.
Also, when XRay is enabled and set to Alpha 1.0, the face dots and occluded faces wireframe is not drawn, but the mesh selection still uses face centers, so selection becomes essentially unpredictable:
It would be nice being able to automatically disable any Raster overlay on render, when entering a extremely high poly cycles viewport, the overlay can severely impact performances, as cycles does not scale on poly count but Eevee does
+1
Blender becomes extremely lagging when overlay is enabled in a scene with a lot of greenery, it’s a big pain to work with such realistic scenes.
In a Corona scatter they solved this problem a hundred years ago just displaying in a viewport only 5% of scattered objects, while in render displayed 100%. In Blender I have not found a way to achieve something similar. So I hope some work will be done in this direction!
In the legacy particle system, there are viewport settings to limit the number of particles displayed in the viewport to a percentage of the particles in the final render. This is both for “real” particles and “children” particles.
Geometry nodes has a “Is viewport” node that allows you to tweak anything in the geometry nodes setup seperately for the viewport and final render.
And overall many places in Blender have a “enable/disable”, “show/hide” in viewport and seperately for final render option.
Thanks.
Is it not more difficult to report bugs this way?
I have reported what I think is a bug, but I can’t tell 100% whether it is overlay-next of geometry nodes related since I can’t test with legacy and rule out one of the two options.
Can I also suggest to edit the first post and “strike-through” the lines related to enabling legacy overlay?
